Page 16 of Guarded By The Alpha

The wolf went very, very quiet.

Not the pressure of a threat. The deep stillness of recognition. Something that mattered had just happened, and the person who'd made it happen was sitting three feet away with her legs crossed and her gray-blue eyes steady on my face.

"Good work," I said.

It came out flatter than I meant it. She didn't seem to notice, or didn't care.

"Same hand across all three," she went on. "Whoever did it worked the same way every time. Which means you could trace them by it, if you've got other things they've cut to compare it to."

"Gideon will want to see this."

"Figured." She closed the laptop. "Also figured you didn't come down here to grade my homework."

Direct. Not a word wasted.

"We've tightened the walls," I said. "The scout told the Council where we are. We're pulling the wards in and doubling the watch. You stay inside until I say otherwise."

"I wasn't planning on a walk."

"Good."

She looked at me a moment with that photographer's precision, the one that made me feel like she was writing down things I hadn't agreed to show her. Then she nodded once and turned back to the laptop.

I should have left.

Instead: "You should meet the team properly."

She looked up again.

"You found a hole in two hours that my people missed. That makes you useful. They should know who they're working with."

Something shifted in her face. Not softening—she didn't soften—but a kind of resetting. The look of someone taking in a fact that didn't fit what she'd thought a minute ago.

"All right," she said.

I introduced her to the whole team out in the corridor by the main room.

Neutral ground. On purpose.

Jace gave her exactly one long, measuring look—the kind he saves for things that might matter—and after that treated her with the careful distance he kept for people he'd decided not to underestimate. From Jace, that's nearly respect.

Gideon introduced himself with the easy polish of a man who already knew everything worth knowing about her, which he did. He asked one sharp question about her work on the missing pages, and it made her sit up with the particular alertness of someone whose competence had just been taken seriously.

Maddox said almost nothing. But I watched him fold her into the edge of what he watched over, the quiet wordless shift of a wolf deciding she was now one of the things he'd protect.

I marked all of it.

I didn't announce what the wolf had decided in that warehouse. I didn't have to. Gideon already knew—it was there in the careful way he very precisely didn't look at the two of us when we shared a room.

Later that night, walking the place alone, I made myself do the honest accounting I'd been putting off.

The Council knew where we were. The woman in my care was worth more to them alive than dead, which made it worse, not better. And I was the man responsible for her who couldn't stand in a room with her without the wolf pressing on the inside of me like a tide against a wall I'd built for exactly this.

Six years. Six years building everything I am on one rule: feelings get people killed, and a commander who stops being a commander buries his own.

I ran the numbers the way a man runs them after he's already survived the alternative once.

The answer came back the same every time: this was either going to be the thing that broke my record, or the thing that broke me.